Amsterdam wins human rights award

University Professor Anthony Amsterdam has won the 2008 Frederick Douglass Human Rights Award from the Southern Center for Human Rights (SCHR). The award, given to individuals who have shown "brilliance and tenacity in the defense of human rights," was presented to Amsterdam on October 2 at a dinner in Washington, D.C.

In a recent exchange with the SCHR, Amsterdam, who formerly headed the Law School's clinics program and currently teaches the Capital Defender Clinic, talked about his defense strategy: "You turn conditions of injustice into issues of injustice by forcing law-makers and decision-makers to choose to perpetuate or change those conditions, so that they feel the active responsibility for subjecting other human beings to conditions they themselves would find unendurable." Lisa Kung '97, SCHR's director, called Amsterdam "the most brilliant legal mind in the modern fight against capital punishment."